Director, Engineering Governance- Mountain View, CA

P-1494

Databricks is the Lakehouse company. More than 7,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn, andFacebook. 

For more information, visit www.databricks.com.

About the Team

We are seeking a highly technical and influential Director of Engineering, Governance Foundation to define how security, privacy, and responsible data practices are built into the core of Databricks’ products and infrastructure. This role is not simply about running programs—it is about designing and scaling the engineering platforms, guardrails, and operating models that make secure and compliant product development the default across a rapidly growing, multi-cloud ecosystem.

This is a strategic, hands-on technical leadership role with significant cross-company impact. You will lead a team of senior security engineers, partner with product and infrastructure leaders, and shape the foundational governance systems that enable Databricks to innovate quickly while maintaining world-class security and customer trust.

What You’ll Own

Security & Privacy Governance Architecture

• Define the company-wide strategy for embedding security, privacy, and responsible data use across engineering workflows and platform components.
• Build scalable governance frameworks that help engineering teams design secure systems from the start, not after the fact.

Incident Learning & Prevention

• Establish and lead a Security & Privacy Postmortem Review process that drives learning, accountability, and long-term resilience.
• Ensure insights from incidents translate into systemic improvements across tools, infrastructure, and engineering culture.

Security Champions & Distributed Expertise

• Rebuild and scale a Security Champions Network that brings security and governance expertise directly into product and infrastructure teams.
• Create centralized enablement, tooling, and shared learning systems that allow thousands of engineers to integrate security seamlessly.

Data Governance for Products & AI

• Lead efforts to ensure responsible data use across AI/ML systems, SaaS environments, and internal workspaces.
• Define and enforce policies that uphold privacy, integrity, auditability, and proper data lifecycle management.

Developer-Centric Security Enablement

• Transform security into a key enabler for engineering velocity.
• Deliver automation, self-service tools, and intelligent guardrails that reduce developer friction while increasing safety and compliance.
• Build JIT (Just-In-Time) security education and systems that proactively surface risky behavior before it becomes an incident.

Security Maturity & Customer Trust

• Identify and elevate Databricks’ security posture to exceed DB50 customer expectations, including areas such as:
  
  
• audit logging
• controlled access workflows
• secure asset import/export
• behavior monitoring and lineage
• Partner with security, IT, and compliance teams to ensure readiness for the most demanding enterprise and regulated environments.

What we need:

We’re looking for a leader who blends deep technical expertise, strategic vision, and organizational leadership:

• A strong engineering foundation with experience in security, privacy, platform governance, or infrastructure architecture.
• Ability to define technical strategy while remaining close enough to the details to lead senior security SMEs.
• Experience building governance programs or security platforms at scale across large engineering organizations.
• Strong partnership skills across product, infrastructure, security, IT, and compliance functions.
• A track record of creating tools, automation, or systems that meaningfully improve developer experience while increasing safety.
• Credibility working with senior ICs, architects, and leadership across multiple domains.

Team & Organizational Structure

• Direct leadership of a team of 4–5 senior Security SMEs (TLM-style org).
• Dotted-line influence over embedded security champions across multiple engineering organizations.
• Significant cross-functional reach with product, platform, and security leadership.

Why This Role Matters

This role shapes how Databricks balances innovation, AI, security, and scale. You will:

• Build durable foundations that make our products secure-by-default.
  Influence engineering practices across thousands of developers.
  Lead governance strategy at a company experiencing explosive growth.
• Strengthen Databricks' trust with our largest, most security-conscious customers.
• Help define what responsible AI and secure cloud development look like at global scale.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in large-scale software engineering, with at least several years leading engineering managers and senior ICs.
• Strong technical grounding in backend systems, distributed systems, identity/security, or enterprise cloud platforms.
• Experience defining governance, security, or enterprise-grade platform capabilities.
• A background as a senior IC (e.g., Staff/Principal Engineer) at some point—this role requires deep technical credibility.
• Proven success hiring, developing, and retaining senior engineering talent.

Expertise driving cross-functional technical programs with senior stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building cloud-agnostic or multi-cloud services.
• Background in enterprise features such as access control, policy engines, compliance, or identity systems.
• Experience leading organizations through scaling phases in high-growth environments.